Wow, this week has flown by and we all miss Racey and look forward to her updates from her work in Nepal. Beatty and Rheema have been hard at work creating new fun things to put on your plate for the holiday weekend. We have our Ground Chicken, Chicken Curry Sausage, Chicken Apple Sausage and now…drum roll please… Chicken Bacon Burger.
I’ve never heard of such a thing…you might be saying. Well, honestly I had not heard of such a thing, but the idea came to me and I thought we would try it. Of course the internet says this is not a new idea, but we were excited to try it with our flavorful ground chicken combined with our no-nitrate bacon. Our first question was: how much bacon is in a chicken bacon burger?
We tried a few experiments with how much bacon to add. Not many friends out there had experience making Chicken Bacon burgers, so I referenced the more typical beef bacon burger, which can have up to 50% bacon. So we started with some small 1lb batches of chicken with 1:1 chicken to bacon and even mixing that up it felt too much. We tried a 2:1 and a 3:1. The 2:1 was the clear winner in our taste tests. Just the right amount of bacon flavor and added fat from the bacon.
I was ready to make 150 lbs as our first batch, and with good sense Rheema and Beatty talked me down to a reasonable 60 lb starter batch. We might learn something, we can make more next week…I’m grateful for some tempered rationale.
We did learn some things. We learned that keeping the bacon really cold, in fact mostly frozen, is helpful for a good grind. And we learned how to cut the bacon down to size so it goes through the grinder evenly, rather than in big bursts leaving us with more bacon than chicken.
All in all we are very happy with how our first round of Chicken Bacon Burger turned out. As an indication, we were testing it all afternoon and I then made some chicken bacon burgers for dinner. Often on a chicken processing day I do not make chicken for dinner just to mix it up a little. Nevertheless, we were all excited to have Chicken Bacon Burgers for dinner. Topped with some cheese from our friends at Sugarhouse Creamery with grilled veggies on the side…yum.
Later in the week we also tried using chicken bacon burger as a base for a garlic scape stir fry. I added some onions to the pan with the chicken bacon burger and after the onions had partially cooked I threw in the scapes and veggies. A pot of brown rice and this will surely be a weeknight staple.
Perhaps my favorite use of the chicken bacon burger was to make “super beans” as the kids called them. Multiple times a week we make burritos/tacos for dinner. Often from leftovers and as a way to keep items in the fridge from going bad…Once a week or so we’ll make a large pot of beans with a ham hock in it and then freeze the cooked beans. Super beans got its name because they tasted “super”! We cooked some onions and chicken bacon burger in a skillet and then added our cooked beans to the mix and yum! We’re taking burritos to a new level. We even had leftover super beans that we used as a salad topper the next day for lunch.
As with all new products, please send us your feedback. Try our Chicken Bacon Burger and let us know what you think! How did you use it? Too much bacon? Too little? We want to know what you think.
Reber Rock Farm Blog 